When I was a kid in late grade school and high
school, I was taught the fundamental tenet of science was reproducibility. If two groups working on opposite sides of the planet or in adjacent labs
performed the same experiment, they should get the same results.

If you didn’t get the same results as I did
by doing precisely the same thing, something was seriously wrong.

According to University of Bristol’s
Marcus Munafò and colleagues, something may indeed be seriously wrong in the state of science, and the problem may be getting dangerously
worse.

“Data from many fields suggests reproducibility is lower than is desirable; one analysis estimates
that 85 percent of biomedical research efforts are wasted, while 90 percent of respondents to a recent survey in Nature agreed that there is a
‘reproducibility crisis,'” Munafò and colleagues offered in the inaugural issue of Nature Human Behaviour in January.
“Whether ‘crisis’ is the appropriate term to describe the current state or trajectory of science is debatable, but accumulated evidence
indicates that there is substantial room for improvement with regard to research practices to maximize the efficiency of the research community’s use
of the public’s financial investment in research.”

To address these concerns, the researchers offered
“a manifesto for reproducible science,” first defining what they believed to be the myriad factors impacting reproducibility and then arguing
“for the adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process: methods, reporting and dissemination, reproducibility, evaluation and
incentives.”

It is to this very last category—incentives—that I turn my attention, as I believe
that failure here will make any attempts to otherwise alter the scientific landscape meaningless.

“Positive, novel and clean results are more likely to be published than negative results, replications and results
with loose ends; as a consequence, researchers are incentivized to produce the former, even at the cost of accuracy, the authors suggested. “These
incentives ultimately increase the likelihood of false positives in the published literature.”

Despite the
anxiety-inducing expansion of the scientific publishing industry, editorial panels will overwhelmingly prefer research that pushes boundaries over that which
merely repeats or tests previous findings. And negative results, in particular, are often left in filing cabinets or on shelves, further skewing our
ability to interpret scientific theories.

Novelty enhances a journal’s prestige. And even in an era of pay-
to-publish journals with little or no editorial oversight, researchers remain incentivized to aim for higher impact journals whenever possible to increase
the likelihood of academic employment or tenure, and continued research funding.

(I am not unaware of the
culpability of lay and industry publications such as DDNews in promoting innovative over confirmatory news. In our defense, if we can’t find
such research, it is difficult to write about it.)

“There will always be incentives for innovative
outcomes—those who discover new things will be rewarded more than those who do not,” Munafò and colleagues stressed.

No one, for example, will win a Nobel Prize for fact-checking.

“However,
there can also be incentives for efficiency and effectiveness—those who conduct rigorous, transparent and reproducible research could be rewarded more
than those who do not,” the authors declared. And the authors offer recommendations on how to do just that.

Ultimately, however, it comes down to money.

Reproducing experiments to reproduce the results is
expensive—particularly with clinical trials—and who is willing to pay the cost given the lack of reward?

Seen from a broader perspective, however, the cost of not doing so may be dramatically higher. Science is already hard enough without turning it into
a faith-based exploit.

Because of the very innovations at the heart of this discussion, science has always been
under siege, both from within and without. And if issues like anti-vaccination campaigns are any indication, the stakes will only get higher.

At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, we all stand to suffer if we don’t address some of the systemic issues
opening the door to rot.

“The key to fostering a robust metascience that evaluates and improves practices is
that the stakeholders of science must not embrace the status quo, but instead pursue self-examination continuously for improvement and self-correction of the
scientific process itself,” Munafò and colleagues concluded.

Ironically, challenging the status quo
is who we are; it is in our DNA. How self-blinkering we would be to make this the one exception to that rule.

You
can freely download the Munafò manifesto at: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021